Abstract

In Ahmadu Bello University, students' portal are not stored in the University data Centre but is hosted by the company hosting the University, in this research, a core/edge SAN was modeled into the current data network, thus allowing the students' portal to be hosted directly on a dedicated secondary network in the University. This work was limited to just the storage of students' portal, but gives us a good initial understanding of the viability of this approach. The main components of the network were modeled modularly as Arena Submodels. It involves building a model of a switch and explicitly including this in a discrete event simulation of a SAN in evaluating how the SAN design will perform in its stochastic environment. For every host-device pair in the core/edge SAN two links was utilized for redundancy. The Performance of the proposed core-edge SAN Design model was tested under two component failure scenarios, the failure of an edge link and a core switch. Effective measurement of storage system activity, such as throughput (T_s )was checked. The results from the simulation shows that the actual mean through-times for the ABU_I. C. T network was4. 26 x ?10?^(-06)seconds, and 1. 04 x ?10?^(-06) seconds for the proposed SAN design (a 75. 9% reduction on a 95% confidence since p-value was 0. 01) and with ?=0. 5 (at max. power) the there was a 33. 99%reduction. The mean through time for the failure of an edge link (scenario 1) in the SAN design was 6. 21 x 10^(-06) (72. 3% reduction). The mean through time for the failure of core switch (scenario 2) in the SAN design was 7. 805 x 10^(-6) (a 65. 3% reduction) showing that the SAN design is of a higher performance measure.

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